For Executive Meeting

Album review

As being an entertainer has more and more come to define success in music, brainiac rock has sadly faded, but happily not gone entirely. Vocalist Elizabeth Nelson and guitarist Timothy Bracy, the husband-and-wife duo at the heart of The Paranoid Style, are keeping smarter-than-average songwriting alive and well on For Executive Meeting. If the title sounds oddly similar to that other album with a bland, corporate-sounding handle—Fountains of Wayne's Welcome Interstate Managers—you'll find an even deeper connection in "The Worst of My Love," as Nelson includes "Waynes of Fountain'' in the slow shout out list that concludes the track, which itself has a whiff of Lou Reed's New York guitar menace.  The quintet, named for a serious and influential 1964 essay on American politics, is energized by Nelson's intellectualized, uber-detailed songwriting, which draws from Shakespeare ("Until Birnam Woods Comes To Dunsinane") and real-life people ("Barney Bubbles"). "A plastic bag, a good man gone," go the lyrics in the latter track, about the graphic designer who worked with Hawkwind and Stiff Records, who gassed himself at the age of 41.  Another subject for Nelson's poet's eye is former Velvet Underground member Doug Yule, who as she tells it, was both naïve victim and opportunistic instigator: "And Lou was a beast/ And Sesnick's a liar/ And sure, no one liked "Squeeze"/ But at least we walked through the fire/ Hey, you and me Doug/ We could've joined the Mingus dynasty." Musically, the songwriting is varied, solid and hooky from beginning to end, along the way referencing punk, alt-country, Big Star, and garage rock. Echoing early Wilco, "I'd Bet My Land and Titles," a duet with Drive-By Truckers' Patterson Hood, is perky folk rock which celebrates the late John Prine in typically crafty lines: "This ain't no church revival/ This ain't no public recital/ No one wants a second viewing once you chart a course to ruin/ No one ever calls from Vegas just to wonder how you're doing." The avalanche of real-life detail continues in "Steve Cropper Plays Femme Fatale," which Nelson improbably connects to a case of nerves before a concert in NYC when she "threw up in a bag on the West Side Highway." An expertly done cover of Rosanne Cash's "Seven Year Ache'' closes this hugely enjoyable, well-played set of clever, acrobatic indie rock anthemic-ness.  © Robert Baird/Qobuz